DOCUMENTARY
IN THE AGE OF
NEW MEDIA
THREE CASE STUDIES
FIRST DRAFT
Doctoral
Dissertation by Theodore Folke
Supervisor: Professor Lars Gustav Andersson
Department of Film and Media
Studies
University of Lund
Lund,
Sweden
Theodore_Folke@fit.nyc.edu
For my father, Ellis I. Folke, who always
believed in me;
for my dear wife Bua , who has always
been there for me;
and for grassroots documentarians
around the world.
“All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their
personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and
social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected,
unaltered. The medium is the massage. Any understanding of social and cultural
change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as
environments.”
Marshall
McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, “ The Medium
is the Massage”[1]
“…just
as the printing press in the fourteenth century and photography in the
nineteenth century had a revolutionary impact on the development of modern
media and culture, today we are in the middle of a new media revolution- the
shift of all culture to computer-mediated forms of production, distribution,
and communication..”
Lev Manovich, “ The Language of New Media”[2]
Table of Contents:
I.
Introduction and Thesis
Statement
II.
Defining Documentary
III.
Defining New Media
IV.
Case Study #1: MONUSCO VIDEO( in progress)
V.
Case Study #2: DEMOCRACY NOW ( in progress)
VI.
Case Study #3: THIS IS CONGO ( in progress)
VII.
Digital Documentary
Pre-Production
VIII.
Digital Documentary Production
IX.
Digital Documentary
Post-Production( in progress)
X.
Digital Documentary
Distribution ( in progress)
XI.
Conclusions:
XII.
Ex Cursus: Interviews
with Digital Documentarians
XIII.
Appendix A: Bibliography
XIV.
Appendix B: Relevant
Links and Websites
I.
Introduction:
“In this age of computerized information and satellite
systems, we must work for the growth of what might be called a “
communicatarian” democracy, giving everybody access to the technical resources
of the mass media both at the national and the international level.”[3]
Sven Hamrell, The
Dag Hammarkjold Foundation
I.1 Introduction
On
July 1, 2012, after almost 5 years as Chief of the Video Unit of MONUSCO,
the
United Nations Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, I
reached the compulsory UN retirement age of 62, and was forced to separate from
the organization. I loved my work, but after 4 decades working in film and
television production on 5 continents, I now finally would have the time to
study the extraordinary evolution media technology in my lifetime – the
evolution popularly known as “ The Digital Revolution”.
Today,
if there are any naysayers who doubt that we are in the midst of an information
revolution in progress, I think the cataclysmic 2016 American Presidential
elections should have removed any remaining doubts. The bottom line is that the
vertical integration of international media production and distribution is no
longer monolithic and omnipotent. Thanks to digital technology, both media
consumers and producers have other options – options which they are now
vigorously exploiting. Manufactured consent can no longer be taken for granted.
Until
recently, the critical study of what we shall call New Media has been hampered by the lack of a language adequate to
describe the new phenomena. Now, thanks to pioneers like Lev Manovich and Henry
Jenkins, such an adequate language is available. The goal of this dissertation is
to use that new language to explore through three case studies how the rapid
development of New Media has changed
the cinematic genre of documentary in terms of production, post-production and
distribution.[4]
In
the spirit of full disclosure, I shall begin with a chronology of my professional
and personal journey from analog to digital media.
I.2. 1950-1980
Born
in New York in 1950 to a Swedish father and an American mother, I spent most of
my childhood in Sweden. As soon I was old
enough, my father tried to introduce me to cinema as an art form. Thanks to him, I learned to distinguish
between cinema art and Hollywood – though I confess my favorite films from those
years were the Boulting Brothers comedies from England.
We
moved to New York and, at age 13, I was sent to a prestigious American boarding
school where I became an art major; in my senior year, I took an experimental
film course with Sergei Eisenstein’s “Film
Form & The Film Sense”[5]
as a textbook, and we screened the standard cinema classics in 16 millimeter - Welles, Fellini, Bergman and
Bunuel - while making our own modest silent 8 mm productions inspired by our
favorite directors ( who, in my case, was Bunuel). While I cannot pretend I had any idea what I
was doing, I loved the entire production process, and was on my way to becoming
a complete cinephile.
In
1968, I became a student of the humanities at the University of Lund in Sweden,
and began to look for summer jobs in the film industry in New York. Since Hollywood could never figure out a
commercial formula for exploitation of documentary films, most documentaries in
those days were produced in New York, and I was able to find work as an
assistant to some of the legends of the cinema verite movement - Ricky Leacock, Shirley Clarke, Bill Jersey
and Robert Elfstrom . Their creative integrity and dedication made a lasting
impression.
In
1972, I got my Filosofie Kandidat in Drama, Theatre and Film from the
University of Lund’s Department of Literary Science, which was kind enough to
publish my thesis “ The Theatrical Theory
of Antonin Artaud.[6]
. I found Artaud’s search for a universal theatrical language fascinating, and attempted
to create a cinematic version of that language while applying for the
Directors’ Line, Film and Television, of Dramatiska Institutet later that year.
I was 22 years old and the competition
for the three places for directors was intense , and I was young and inexperienced
. After I was rejected. Janos Hersko ,
then the Directing Instructor, was kind enough to see me, and he suggested
I reapply when I was older and had more work to show.
That
was all I needed to hear.
It
was time to make a film of my own. Through some friends, I found a unique
school called The Orson Welles Film School[7]
in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The brain child of Harvard Business School
graduates, this school allow me to work in their restaurant to pay my tuition and have free access to 16 mm
equipment and an editing room. In two years, I completed my first 40
minute film - a 16 mm. color science
fiction thriller titled “Mato Grosso
Bye-Bye”(1974).
As is often the case with first films, “Mato Grosso Bye-Bye” was a mix of both
personal triumphs as well as harsh
cinematic lessons learned. Public
reactions to screenings in Europe and New York told me that, while the production
quality of the film was good, my scriptwriting skills needed a lot of work. Fortunately for me, a few of my cultural heros
like the author William S. Burroughs and the cartoonist Neal Adams liked the film,
and the production quality was good enough
to land me a freelance assignment with United Nations Television in New York
writing and directing the official UN Thirtieth Anniversary film “ To Be Thirty” [8]
(1975) with my colleagues Steve Whitehouse and David Sherman serving as
co-writer and editor, respectively.
It seemed like
a great opportunity. Our assignment was to create a short film (c. 13 minutes)
on how the United Nations had changed over 30 years, and the target audience
was to be a North American youth audience.
In production terms, the film was to be a compilation film in the style created
by the great Soviet filmmaker Esther Shub using the UN Film Library for stock material.
While
the UN Film Library turned out to a treasure trove of rare historic footage
from around the world, I soon discovered why I had been given this assignment; thanks
to Cold War politics, the film was a political minefield. Major events like the
Korean and Vietnam Wars were completely taboo, which made it impossible to
deliver a linear historical narrative with any credibility.
My
solution was to abandon the standard boilerplate UN Griersonian Direct Address narration ( derided in-house as “The Voice of God”) and instead create an impressionistic, stream-of-conscious
narration that dealt with emotional realities in no particular chronological
order. Thanks to creative support from
our boss Marcel Martin, former head of the Canadian Film Board, as well as a spectacular sound track
by the popular English group Pink Floyd , “
To Be Thirty” was a dramatic departure from conventional UNTV institutional
fare.
After our more senior colleagues expressed
their extreme reservations, “To Be
Thirty” surprised everyone by winning many prizes and becoming the most
popular UN film ever, shown around the world for many years in over 15
different languages. In spite of this success, it soon became clear there were
no openings at the UN Secretariat for anyone without serious political
connections.
While
UNTV appeared well positioned to produce high quality documentaries about important issues ranging
from climate change to refugee resettlement, the strong emphasis on avoiding
controversy made it difficult to tell any stories with dramatic interest, and ,
in the dynamic era of Cinema Verite, the
institutional UN films were notorious stylistic dinosaurs [9].
In fact, UNTV films had little distribution in the Western world, and almost
none at all in the United States.
There
was also a basic ethical issue that troubled me and some of my colleagues ;
since we were promoting what was then called The New World Order, shouldn’t that New World Order include stories told by the people of those
countries themselves? The idea of white Westerners like us making films about
the serious issues of the developing world seemed more than a bit neo-colonial,
and we had many discussions about how to change that. [10]
My
dream was to get out into what UN veterans call “ the field” – where the real
work was being done, far from the bureaucratic intrigues of the UN Secretariat
- so I was thrilled when I was offered a post on the first UN Mission to
Namibia in 1978. I remember I had been preparing for the trip for a few weeks when South Africans invaded
Angola and the mission had to be aborted .[11]
I
decided it was time to return to Sweden to taken up Professor Ingvar Holm’s
1972 invitation to become a member of his Doctoral Program in Drama, Theatre
and Film at the University of Lund . I proposed a dissertation on the Indian
film industry to use it as a template for film industries in the developing
world.
After
completing my 55 credits of course work in Lund, I received a grant from the Swedish International Development Agency to
do doctoral research for my project. At that time, little was known in the
Western world regarding the Indian film industry, except that it had competed
successfully with Hollywood in some parts of the world, and was supposedly the
world’s largest film industry.
Unfortunately,
after six months in India in 1979, I discovered that both the Indian film
industry – not to mention India itself- was far more complex than I could have
imagined. In my travels around the Indian subcontinent, I learned that the
Indian film industry was de-centralized, with films produced in many states in
the local languages; there was apparently no dubbing at all. In addition, it
was difficult to get reliable numerical data of any kind, and, not being
Indian, I was hesitant to make any aesthetic assessment of the films I was
seeing.
Eventually,
I discovered what appeared to be a thriving film industry in the southern
Indian state of Kerala, which produced over 100 feature film a years in the
local language of Malayalam. I was impressed, and was even more impressed when
I saw the quality of the best Malayalam films, which had more in common aesthetically
with Italian neo-realism than the standard Bombay masala formula melodramas which permeated the cinemas in the rest
of the country.
Then
I learned from Keralan film producers that the local film industry was
notorious for laundering money earned by the many Keralans working in the
Persian Gulf states, and I was forced to reconsider my plan to make the
Malayalam industry a model for the developing world. If the money laundering
was as pervasive as I was being told, there is no way I could present Kerala as
a sustainable model for media development in the developing world. Certainly
not, at any rate to SIDA. In short, I had reached a philosophical dead end; I if
there was a viable template for an alternative to the Western-dominated global media
, it was not Kerala.[12]
One
good thing happened in India that made the trip personally worthwhile; I got to
know cinematographer Sven Nykvist, who was shooting a film for American
director Paul Mazursky, who was a friend. Sven was looking for a screenwriter
to adapt a story by Swedish author Sigfried Sodergren about colonial life in
the French Congo called “The Man on the
Island”. When Paul recommended me, I had a job. I started work for Sven in Sweden, and
returned my grant to SIDA.
Sven
was wonderful to work for. He was full
of stories, and he taught me a great deal about the film industry and Congo,
where Sven’s parents had been missionaries. When Sven told me he would be
working with Ingmar Bergman
on
Ingmar’s FANNY AND ALEXANDER in Filmhuset , I decided this would be a
good time to reapply to Dramatiska
Institutet and further my professional development with Janos Hersko
I.3: 1980-2000
This
time I was accepted, and I graduated from the Directors’ Line of Dramatiska Institutet in Stockholm in
1983. It was the best educational experience I have ever had. Janos kept me and
my two directing classmates[13]
constantly busy with production exercises
of increasing complexity and intensity with our respective teams, and was always a
tough critic. In those days, film stock was a big out-of-pocket expense for DI,
so we were forced to carefully plan every shot, which was excellent training.[14]
There
was also a big emphasis on developing teamwork skills. We directors were also
writers and editors, we had to learn to persuade our teammates to do what we
wanted them to do, and that was also excellent training. In addition, the
school helped us get paying jobs on our vacations, so I had the opportunity to
edit 16 mm newscasts for Swedish Television, and 35 mm features for Europa
Film. Perhaps the piece de resistance was the opportunity to work as interns on
Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander”.
We
also had a television course in which we could shoot analog video with both
studio cameras and ¾ inch portable cameras, and then edit both off-line and
on-line. I quickly appreciated the limits of analog video at that time; the
studio cameras were big and cumbersome, the portable cameras were very
expensive, and the on-line editing required a lot of expensive hardware. The
entire workflow of analog video was so expensive that it was only an option for
the wealthiest countries. In addition, there was the problem of substantial
loss of quality in duplication from the original in both picture and sound.
It
was clear that analog video was still unsuitable for most documentaries, and, as
a result, the professional medium for documentaries remained celluloid. This
usually meant larger crews in the field[15]
and substantial costs for air freight transportation and refrigeration for heat
sensitive film stock both on location and for shipping to one of the few
reliable film laboratories in the world for processing and prints. Given the
normally high shooting ratio of documentaries – anywhere from 20:1 to 60:1 –
this meant documentaries were an expensive proposition, and rarely a
commercially lucrative venture. As a result, there were few documentaries made about
issues of concern to the developing world, and some Third World countries
responded by calling for a New World
Information Order.[16]
My
distrust for the new electronic technology was only heightened by a disastrous introduction to digital sound in
1983. I had planned a big screening of
my examination film “ Supernova ,
starring the late Monica Zetterlund, and my sound engineer wanted to use DI’s
brand new digital mixing board and make a digital sound track in 17.5
millimeter. Without having any idea what I was doing, I agreed. The results were catastrophic – the film went
way out of synch, and , try as we might for two days and nights, we could not correct the problem. When we
showed the film to the invited guests, the film was still out of synch. I had
to interrupt the screening and show the double-system rough cut I had edited,
and
pray
that all my splices would hold and that the film would not start to burn in the
projector. That was one of the worst experiences of my professional life, and I
avoided all things digital for almost a decade.[17]
Fortunately,
thanks in large part to my work for Sven Nykvist , I had a job as soon as I
graduated from DI - an offer to write a
screenplay for a major Swedish producer – Christer Abrahamsen and Europa Film.. The project was a feature
comedy with the popular Swedish comedy star Janne Carlsson and his friend Gosta
Walivaara, who already had an idea for the film. Janne had a reputation for being difficult to
work with, but we got along, and I was even invited to join the team on a
research trip to the co-producing country of Cuba. The result was the satirical
comedy “ Svindlande Affarer”, which
somehow survived a mid-production change of directors and the Svensk Filmindustri take over of Europa Film to become the most popular
Swedish film of 1985.
Indeed, in spite of overwhelmingly negative
reviews, the film eventually became the biggest box office hit of the year in
Sweden, and the Minister of Culture even had kind words for the film at the
yearly Guldbagge award. Unlike the
critics, who attacked the conservative personal politics of the star, Janne
Carlsson, the minister seemed to understand that the subtext of the film was a
satire on supply side economics, Indeed. the Cuban co-producer I talked with at
the premiere in Stockholm certainly understood my intentions with the
screenplay. and he was kind enough to tell me I would be welcome in Cuba for
any future project.[18]
Producer
Christer Abrahamsen was also happy with my work; after the tragic assassination
of Prime Minister Olof Palme, Christer asked me if I wanted to write a screenplay
about the murder. I was interested, but when I learned that a director I knew
and respected named Kjell Sundvall was planning his own film on the assassination,
and that his theory regarding the guilty parties was similar to mine, I told
Christer that I had to pass.
I returned to New York and, for the next few
years, I worked in New York as an film editor and writer for various producers
while trying to sell feature screenplays, but with little success. In 1986, I
had what I thought might be a
breakthrough with a feature comedy written with African friend Elisabeth
Atnafu for Paramount Pictures titled “
Ambassador at Large” about an
African UN Ambassador in New York.
However, after expressing interest, Paramount suddenly changed their
minds.
When the film “ Coming to America” had its premiere, both Elisabeth and I saw
substantial similarities to our submitted screenplay. So did Writers Guild, East
President Mona Mangan, who told us that such disputes were not uncommon in
America. However, we could not afford a lawyer, and it took us a few years to
find one who would take the case on spec, or for a percentage of the eventual settlelent.
In 1993,we sued Paramount for $100 million, and the case even got some
publicity.[19]
Our lawyer Carl Person was apparently a
specialist, and he thought we had a strong case because of the obvious similarities and the fact that we
had written proof that Paramount had had access to our screenplay.
Ultimately, however, the case was adjudicated
by an 80 year old judge who failed to see sufficient similarities as we did, and the case was closed. I decided to avoid
dealing with the major studios for a while, and began to focus on working with
people through the Independent Feature Project, an organization which held a
yearly market to help independent film makers find international buyers.[20]
At the time, New York independents were
experimenting with new production technology, and in 1994, I had my second encounter
with digital sound; this time the experience was positive. I was supervising
the re-shoot of low budget feature for a
friend, and I had to meet with the composer to record the sound track. The
composer turned out to be producer of rap music named Floyd F. (“ Fucking”)
Fisher. I discovered Mr. Fisher had a portable Sony DAT
digital recorder of the kind that the Recording Industry of America had
unsuccessfully tried to ban in the United States, and I decided to test it for
all our sound work – including music and voice-overs. The results were a
revelation. With his humble $500 .DAT
recorder, Mr. Fisher was able to make sound recordings in a quiet room of a
better quality than I had been making for $500. an hour for the UN at big New
York sound studio like MagnoSound. I suddenly understood why the RIA wanted to
stop these recorders; we proceeded to do the final sound mix in a low budget digital
production house, and all went well. [21]
We
were less fortunate with the images. We had shot on a new Sony analog video
format called Hi-8, with mixed results. The camera was small and easy to work
with, but, while the first generation images looked excellent, as soon as we
made a copy, the picture deteriorated significantly. Clearly Hi-8 was not the
answer. I went back to the drawing board and continued to develop projects and
try to keep up with the latest technological developments until the end of the
Millennium.
To
help pay the rent, I got a job in 1997 as an adjunct professor of English and
Speech at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology, a division of the State
University of New York and one of the world’s largest design schools, with a
highly diverse student body from around the world. I enjoyed teaching at FIT; I
was able to teach courses in English Composition, Short Fiction, Film History
and Screenwriting, and both my students and colleagues were supportive and
creative.
I.4 .2000-2012:
In 1999, I was unexpectedly offered a position
as a video producer with UNTAET, the new UN Administration in the tiny
Southeast Asian island nation of East Timor. Since I had been unofficially on a
DPI black list for more than a decade, I wondered why on earth I was even being
considered for this job.
In
1988, I had been asked to write a screenplay for a long form documentary ( 27
minutes) for the official UN film for International
Year of Shelter for The Homeless. The director was my good friend Simone
diBagno from Italy, and he had shot in Rio de Janiero, Sri Lanka and New
York. As was the case with all UN films,
we had been instructed to show solutions rather than problems. we had done our
best to find a typical UN compromise that would satisfy all parties. However,
the American government of Ronald Reagan refused to compromise, insisting that
we not show any homeless from America.
Both
director Simone and I balked at this blatant political interference, which was
a violation of the UN Charter.. We decided to leak the dispute to the press,
and the result became a minor scandal when the American ambassador confirmed to
a New York Times reporter that he had
given the UN instructions “ not to show homeless from New York unless we
emphasized freedom of choice…”
Thanks
to this scandal, the film “ Shelter For
the Homeless”, with a patronizing Voice
of God narration, got a lot more attention in American media than it
deserved, and actually won prizes at the Karlovy Vary Festival , as well as an
award from something called the Pyongyang Film Festival. [22]
My personal prize had been become persona
non grata at UNTV .
I could only assume I was being offered the
job in East Timor because no one else wanted to do it. After all, East Timor was a remote, mosquito
infested island with a violent history, as well as tropical diseases like encephalitis,
malaria and dengue.
In short, East Timor sounded perfect for me.
After
meeting the charismatic Nobel Peace Prize winning East Timorese leader Jose Ramos
Horta in New York , I began to see the
story of East Timor’s successful 25 year struggle as one of the political miracles of the late
20th century. I also knew from colleagues that the UNTAET Video Unit
was completely digital, so I became eager to start the new millennium with
UNTAET ,
When
I arrived in the UNTAET Video Unit office in the East Timorese capital of Dili in January, 2000, I could see that our rented computer hardware
had already seen much better days. Furthermore, I discovered that our editing
software was a user unfriendly clone of Adobe Premiere called Speed Razor,
which I would not wish on my worst enemy. And while we had sturdy Sony TRV 900
cameras, the island had no electricity, so any local broadcasts were out of the
question.
The
UNTAET Video Unit consisted of myself, a talented Danish colleague who was an
experienced videographer, two capable East Timorese cameramen, who had been
working with Indonesian television, and an Australian who was on vacation. The UNTAET
mandate emphasized capacity building, so there was one East Timorese for every
international . We started to prepare for the official opening of UNTAET, and
the arrivals of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and newly elected Indonesian President Abdur Rahman to help celebrate
the opening.
At
the time of my arrival, an Australian led intervention force called INTERFET
was winding down operations to pacify the East Timorese half island and hunt
down the remnants of Indonesian backed militias who were still terrorizing the
Timorese. East Timor itself was in ruins, thanks to the Indonesian army’s
scorched earth policy; an estimated 80 % of all structures had been burned when
the TNI left after the UN –run popular referendum had decisively voted 78.5 %
for East Timorese self-determination in late 1999.
The
UN mission running the referendum, UNAMET, had been effectively chased off the
island, and the many mutilated bodies we saw in the Dili morgue were clear evidence
of massacres. Confronted with this massive devastation left behind due to the
scorched earth policy, I decided to document as much as possible both for the
legal record as well to be able to tell the story to future generations of East Timorese and international audiences.
My
Timorese colleagues showed me reported massacre sites around Dili and helped me
set up interviews with eyewitnesses.[23]As
the story began to take shape, our Australian colleague returned from this
vacation. As soon as I met him, I knew I had a problem. While I outranked him
in the UN hierarchy, he seemed to think he was the boss. He was also
threatening and physically aggressive, and was more than ready to sabotage my
work in any way he could.
A
month later, some furious East Timorese colleagues told me this Australian
colleagues had physically assaulted one of our female Timorese presenters; to
calm things down, I organized a staff
meeting, fully expecting that this assault
would be punished – only to be shocked when I failed to get any support from the
administration, and the Australian got off without even a slap on the wrist.
Clearly, he had friends in high places.
It
was a difficult situation. UNTAET was in start-up mode, and there were internal
power conflicts in many departments. Did I want to commit to a long internal
struggle with a possible physical confrontation? I was not sure. While I have a black belt in Aikido, my job
description was to be a video producer, and my training is to find peaceful
conflict resolution when possible. I could see, however, that this conflict
might be long and unpleasant, with an uncertain outcome.
Thanks
to digital media, however, there was another option. I had discovered digital
dupes were as good as originals, and I knew from my friends at UNTV in New York
I would have their support if I made an independent feature documentary about
UNTAET. Over the course of a few weeks, I quietly duped all the min-dv tapes in
the office. When it was time to renew my contract, I left the mission with some 70 hours of mini-dv
tapes in my backpack.
Back
in New York, with the help of user friendly Apple service centers like
Tek-Serve, I was able to buy a Final Cut Pro 3 editing suite for about $10,000.
, and some of my students at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology were
even kind enough to serve as interns on the production. One – Jade Ann Benetatos – had used Final Cut Pro before, and she patiently
taught me how to use it. All of my film instincts were wrong, but Jade Ann, as
a true digital native, showed me how I had to fundamentally change my approach to
digital media.
Since
we were making a compilation documentary, we were constantly searching for
archival material to compliment the original material I brought back from East
Timor. United Nations Television had given me the rights to that material free
of charge, but otherwise I had to digitize whatever material I could find, and
hope to find money to pay for the rights when the project was completed. Thanks
to John Miller, of the East Timor Action Network, I was able to obtain a lot of
excellent material which filled in the gaps in the historical narrative I
wanted to tell.
In
August, 2002, I was invited to screen a rough cut of the documentary to help
celebrate Timor Leste’s Independence Day at the United Nations in New York.
The
working title was “East Timor: Betrayal
and Resurrection”, and the audience included many veterans of the 1999
siege of the UNAMET mission compound in Dili. Their response was both positive
and gratifying .
I was also personally thrilled by the quality
of the projected sound and image in the theatre; it was hard to believe that
these images had come from the innocuous Mini-DV tapes I had brought back from
East Timor in my backpack.
In
December, 2003, the final cut of “East Timor: Betrayal and Resurrection “ won
the UN Correspondents’ Association’s
Ricardo Ortega Award for Excellence in Electronic Journalism; I shared the
dais with fellow UNCA Award recipients Hans Blix, Lakhdar Brahimi, and Nicole
Kidman, and former UNSG Kofi Annan presented the award. That was a proud moment;
my competition for the award had included producers from the BBC, CNN and the
other major global networks. [24]
In
2005, I was invited to return to Timor Leste by Prime Minister Xanana
Gusmao and President Jose Ramos Horta to do a documentary sequel ; my wife and I sold
our house outside of New York, and I bought a Sony Z-1 camera and a customized
Apple Powerbook for editing on location in Timor Leste.
In
2006, we set up a production office with an editing suite in Thailand , only to
learn that President Ramos Horta had been shot and seriously wounded in
post-electoral violence. We had to put
our plans to work in Timor Leste on hold, and
I decided this might be time to resume work on my dissertation. I visited Professor Erik Hedling in Lund to see
if that would be possible. Professor Hedling gave me the green light, and
I got a job as a Lecturer in Multimedia
at an English language school called Asian University in Thailand.
One
year later, I unexpectedly received an offer from the United Nations Mission to
the Democratic Republic in the Congo (MONUC) to become Chief , Video Unit. For
me, this job offer was both a great honor and a vindication, and I accepted without hesitation. I already knew
a bit about Congo from my work with Sven Nykvist, and MONUC was the biggest and
most important UN Peacekeeping mission in the world – a giant step up from
UNTAET.
After
going through induction and training at the UN Base in Brindisi, Italy, I anarrived in Kinshasa on December 7, 2007, and found an
talented international Video Unit staff of 10, equipped with the latest
Sony HD cameras and a number of state-of-art editing suites. In short, the job was a dream come true,
Over the next 5 years, we produced some
memorable long form documentaries for the international audience, as well as
over 200 weekly video magazines shown across the Democratic Republic of the
Congo. [25]
I managed to survive 6 different senior managers, ultimately becoming OIC/PID
myself before I left. I am proud to say that the Video Unit itself was
relatively free of intrigues and conflict, and we managed to keep our creative
core intact until UN rules forced me to retire at age 62 in July, 2012.
I.5 2012-Present:
Before
I retired from MONUSCO, my wife and I discussed our future plans. She wanted to
return to New York, so we put our house in Thailand on the market and set about
planning our move. I found out from my old colleagues at SUNY/FIT that I would
be able to return as an Adjunct Assistant Professor of English and Communications,
as well as create film courses for the brand new Department of Film, Media
Studies and Performing Arts. In short, I would be welcomed back to my old home
at SUNY/FIT.
While
I was officially now an educator again, I also had two major projects in mind.
I knew both projects would have the blessing of my superiors at FIT; even
though FIT is a design school, they had been very supportive of my East Timor
film,
and had even helped me arrange a gala screening at FIT in 2006 for East Timor’s
newly elected President Xanana Gusmao and his then Foreign Minister, my old
friend Jose Ramos Horta. [26]
I.6 Congo Calling:
First
of all, as a television producer, I wanted to make an independent feature
documentary to tell the story of MONUSCO and Congo to the world - just as I
tried to do for UNTAET and East Timor. I knew I had a number of advantages I
had lacked with UNTAET.
Among
other things I had 5 years of pre-edited , high quality, original material, most
of which had already been distributed and well received both inside and outside
Congo. I also had the official blessing of the United Nations Department of
Peacekeeping Operations and the UN Department of Public Information, both of
which had liked my work in Congo.
To
seek financing outside the UN, which has no funds for such productions. I
resurrected my old American production company, The Samba Project,LLC, added
two colleagues from MONUSCO – editor Meriton Ahmeti from Kosovo and
cinematographer Albert Liesegang from Germany – and produced a demo reel to
show to prospective backers.[27]
For backers with short attention spans, we created a 5 minute demo with the
working title of “ Congo Calling”.[28]
Finally,
to present the best material in sequence I assembled a Video Portfolio. [29]
As
I write now, Congo is in a state of political turmoil, and has been declared a
humanitarian disaster by international relief agencies. Unfortunately, unless
there is an Ebola outbreak, there seems to be little interest in Congo in
mainstream Western media. As was the case with East Timor, Congo does not seem
to be considered worthy of mainstream news coverage.
All
the more reason, then, for independent documentaries like “ Congo Calling” to tell this important story. As I write, the
Congolese director of “Congo Calling”, Horeb
Bulambo Shindano, is about to attend the June 29 premiere in New York of a
feature documentary he helped to produce – “
This is Congo”.[30]
I.7
Documentary in the Age of New Media:
My
second project has been that of an educator- writing this dissertation. I have
been collecting material for almost a decade now and my views on the Digital Revolution
have changed along with my professional status. When I was working in East
Timor and Congo with a focus on production, I was an unabashed Digital Utopian. The rapid evolution of
Digital production methods had made my work easier, and sometimes even made
what had seemed impossible possible. Now, however, as an educator at FIT in New
York since 2014, I find I have become more reserved in my enthusiasm, and might
be described as a Digital Agnostic.
There are several reasons for this change.
The
first is that my students in my EN 321 Strategies
for Business Communications classes seem concerned with the way social media is taking over lives an early age in the United States.
Unlike a country like Congo, where internet and wi-fi connections are limited, social media has become pervasive –if
not dominant – among young people in New York. There is little question that social media today plays an important role as a communications tool.
[31] My student’s concerns
are echoed by some social scientists and media critics who believe that the
impact of New Media transcends even cognitive functions; these
social scientists today are asserting that the first generation which has grown
up with access to digital technology seems to be significantly different than
preceding generations, and that their brains actually function differently than
those of preceding generations.As American educator Mark Prensky puts it, “Our students have changed radically.
Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed
to teach.”[32]
In
other words, there is a major generation gap in the works that educators and
other professionals are now striving to define. Prensky calls those who have
grown up with digital technology Digital
Natives, and those of us born earlier Digital
Immigrants Dr. Gary Small, who has been conducting research into the
neurological effects of internet , goes even farther, asserting that a phsyiological brain
gap has been created by use of digital technology, and that this gap is
increasing day by day.[33]
The
results of this transformation are still under study; however, pundits seem to
agree that Digital Natives have short
attention spans, read fewer books and newspapers, and have a tendency to ignore
historical precedents. These tendencies they attribute to what some have called
information overload, or information glut; there is simply too
much information to process and
reflection therefore becomes impossible.[34]
Digital Natives are therefore frequently in a state of continuous partial attention, or what Dr. Gary Small terms a digital fog.[35]
In
terms of cinema and cinema studies, there is also a major disconnect in
progress among Digital Natives with the tradition of analog cinema, in general;
just as it is difficult for today’s educators to get students to read books, it
is difficult to get today’s students to watch old films – particularly black
and white, not to mention silent films. However, speaking as a Digital Immigrant, it has been my happy
experience as an educator that, once the initial threshold of resistance is
passed, contemporary students can appreciate cinematic quality of all kinds, no
matter how old it is. [36] For example, my FIT students respond enthusiastically
to cinema classics like Dziga Vertov’s “
The Man With a Movie Camera” [37].
However,
as an educator, I confess I find the lack of cinematic literacy among the
current generation of American Millennials to be distressing. Even well
educated students who are film majors with an active interest in the arts have
seen few of the films generally regarded as classics – be they films by
Fellini, Kurosawa, Wilder or others. It seems that the entire culture of art
cinemas in New York has vanished, and is not being replaced. Seeing “ La Dolce Vita” or “ Seven Samurai” on an i-phone cannot be
compared to seeing these films as they were intended to be seen – on a big
screen in a theatre with other cineastes.
Personally, I have found it gratifying to be able to introduce students to
these classics in the state-of-the-art digital theatre at FIT, and I am happy
to report the students’ reactions have been as enthusiastic as their response
to Vertov’s works. Indeed, it has been
my experience that audiences everywhere in the world still respond to quality, and, contrary to the view of
some communicators, it is not necessary to “dumb
down” communications products for anyone – be they Digital Natives or citizens of the developing world.
Nonetheless,
the future for motion picture theatres in the United States looks bleak.[38]
A corollary to this decline in cinematic literary in the United States is the
sudden lack of interest in traditional motion picture production methods. While
digital technology has made everything easier, it has also facilitated short
cuts in the creative process and, in some cases, led to a complete rejection of
professional analog production methods. [39]
While
I have always been an advocate of free expression, I believe craftsmanship and
teamwork are essential parts of high quality cinematic expression – and that
includes the craft of scriptwriting and production planning. As an educator, I
believe we do a disservice to our students when we overlook these skills.
That
much said, documentarians, with few vested interests to protect, and being
generally radical by nature, have enthusiastically embraced digital technology,
and – unlike many of their corporate and political sponsors - are now in the
vanguard of exploring the possibilities of this new age of human development.
Indeed, the documentary genre is in the midst of something of a renaissance. This
dissertation is an attempt to profit from their combined experience and their
examples.
Digital Documentary, being significantly less
expensive and easier to produce than its analog predecessor, is making
documentary far more democratic and international than it ever was during the
analog era; we must acknowledge that analog cinema was never a particularly
democratic form of communication. As
American cinema historian James Monaco writes:” Film has changed the way we perceive the world, and therefore how we
operate in it. Yet, while the existence of film may be revolutionary, the
practice of it most often has not been. Because the channels of distribution
have been limited, because costs have prohibited access to film production to
all but the wealthiest, the medium has been subject to strict control.[40]
It
is my hope that the proliferation of Digital
Documentary means that people
around the world can, for the first time, visually
document and share stories about their realities with their peers virtually
everywhere. This is potentially a radical change.
In
this respect, the state of digital documentary is but a microcosm of the larger
world of multimedia; to echo the words of many a pundit, we find ourselves at a
watershed moment in human development, a moment at which we suddenly have
access to tools and capacities we could only have dreamt of a few years ago.
Our
ability to harness these tools in a positive way will be greatly dependent upon
our grasp of the many implications of their use. If this dissertation can
follow in that illustrious tradition, it will have achieved its goals. However,
I am well aware that my humble effort here is also a bit like trying to catch
lightning in a bottle; as the American cultural critic Neil Postman warned us
in 1992,“A new technology does not add or
subtract something. It changes everything.”[41]
I.8 Note on Terminology
used:
Let
us attempt to put the Digital Revolution in a historical context; prior to the
Millennium, analog technology was the
standard for communications industries around the world; today, almost two
decades later, digital technology has
become the universal standard for these industries. While a digital copy might
appear identical to an analog original, it is inherently different; in simple
terms, analog media is linear, and
sequential, while digital media is non-linear.
These
distinctions are fundamental to understanding digital technology, which was
first mentioned in a paper written in 1936 by a brilliant British mathematician
named Alan Turing, perhaps best known for cracking the German Enigma Code in
World War II. Working with a theoretical computer model, Turing proved that a
digital computer could be “ programmed to
perform the function of any other information-processing device."[42]
The
subject of this dissertation is the relationship between a 20th
century cinematic form in a 21st century technological environments.
Traditional distinctions between analog media forms such as print, film, and
even television are invalid when transferred to multimedia[43].
For example, in film studies, documentary
has generally been categorized as a genre
of the film medium. What, then, is the relationship between documentary film and digital documentary?
The
answer is that they may be aesthetic cousins employing the same general
aesthetic conventions and genre rules, but are fundamentally different media
forms.
For
example, a digital documentary copy of a documentary such as Robert Flaherty’s classic “Nanook of the North,” might appear to be
identical, but, in reality, a digital
documentary is as radically different from a documentary film as an internet
blog is from a traditional newspaper. As shall be seen, the entire process of
documentary production from financing, research through to distribution has
been dramatically changed. In the process, new creative paradigms are rapidly
evolving, as are new business models.
What
with the speed of this change, the author has noticed some some confusion in
terminology in both professional and academic circles. For example, terms like “ Digital Film”, and “ digital documentary film” are popular, but are fundamentally incorrect; a digitized
copy of a film might seem identical to the original, but it can never be an analog film. To eliminate confusion between
the terms analog and digital documentary, in this
dissertation we shall therefore refer to both analog and documentary simply as documentary . [44]
Otherwise,
for general purposes, this dissertation shall employ the terminology used by
American film critic and cinema scholar J. Hoberman, who makes the following
distinctions : “Cinema means a form of
recorded and hence repeatable moving image and, for the most part, synchronized
recorded sound. Television kinescopes and TV since videotape are cinematic; so
is YouTube. The terms motion pictures or movies imply a projected image; film
refers to movies that are produced on or projected as celluloid (or its
derivatives) and hence have some basis in photography.”[45]
Fortunately,
there are some academicians who have been trying to create a method and a
terminology to help us understand how this new technology works. Professor Henry
Jenkins of the University of Southern California is one, and his theory of Convergence Culture is a fascinating attempt
to describe the phenomenon of what is now called New Media .[46] However, Associate Professor Lev
Manovich of the Visual Arts Department of the University of California, San
Diego, is my personal favorite. His book “The
Language of New Media” has been invaluable in helping me understand how to
place the genre of documentary in the context of what he calls New Media.[47]
While
Jenkins focuses on the forms of Distribution
of New Media, Manovich places an equal emphasis on Production and Post-Production,
which seems more useful for my study of Documentary
in The Age of New Media. I must
confess I also firmly agree with Manovich’s use of Dziga Vertov’s work as a
template for what he calls Database
Cinema[48],
so I have employed his terminology where applicable
I.9.Thesis Statement:
The
goal of this dissertation is to explore the impact of New Media on Documentary
through three Case Studies. The case studies have been chosen
to
emphasize a diversity in approaches to producing and distributing documentary
through new media.
1.
The MONUC Video Unit.[49]
2.
Democracy Now[50]
3.
THIS IS CONGO (Dogwoof
Productions)[51]
[1]
Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore (The
Medium is the Massage) Bantam Books, 1967. p.26
[2]
Lev Manovich ( The Language of New Media)
Masschutsetts Institute of Technology Press,2001. P.19
[3]
Andreas Fuglesang, (Filmmaking in
Developing Countries I: The Uppsala Worskhop) The Dag Hammarskjold
Foundation, 1975, p.9
[4]
Lev Manovich/Andreas Kratky ( Soft
Cinema- Navigating the Database) The MIT Press, 2005, p. 5
[5]
Sergei Eisenstein, (Film Form and The
Film Sense) Meridian, New York. 1959.
[6] https://www.amazon.com/theatrical-theory-Antonin-Artaud-categorization/dp/B0007C8DTQ
[7] I
later discovered Orson Welles had never heard of the school – they had used his
name without even asking. Mr. Welles was
kind and said nothing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orson_Welles_Cinema
[8]Here
is a link to “ To Be Thirty :
https://vimeo.com/69173621
[9]
As Steve Whitehouse, my friend and
collaborator on “ To Be Thirty”
quipped,”They want us to make the worst
films in the world – because then nobody will want to watch them , and there
won’t be any problems…”
[10]
More on this in Chapter 3
[11] https://peacemaker.un.org/namibia-resolution435
[12]
When I first arrived in New Delhi in 1979, I met with Bo Karre, who was then
the local SIDA representative. He listened to my plans, and then advised me to
write whatever I was going to write immediately, because, after six months I would
be too confused to write anything. When he said this, I was a bit insulted, but he was subsequently proven
right.
[13]
Jonas Frick and Fredrick Becklen
[14]
My short films at Dramatiska Institutet 1981-83: https://vimeo.com/69233308
[16]
For more on The New World Information
Order, please see Chapter 3
[17]
Link to ‘ Supernova”: https://vimeo.com/151430783
[18] Svindlande Affarer, Part 1 https://youtu.be/Ed6CNCk8cyY
[19] https://variety.com/1993/biz/news/america-tries-on-another-suit-115453/
[21] http://www.obsoletemedia.org/digital-audio-tape/
[22]
Here is a link to “Shelter for the
Homeless “Part 1: https://vimeo.com/272049550
[23]
This material was to prove invaluable when I testified as an expert witness in
2001 on behalf of six East Timorese
plaintiffs in a Human Rights case –brought against Indonesia General
Johnny Lumintang in US Federal Court.
General Lumintang never showed up, and the East Timorese were initially awarded
$66 million. They would never see the money, but for the proud East Timorese,
the legal victory was an important vindication.
https://ccrjustice.org/home/what-we-do/our-cases/doe-v-lumintang
[24]
Link to “East Timor : Betrayal and
Resurrection “
,https://youtu.be/j_s46-5R4OE
[26]
Please see attachment from FIT’s in-house newspaper here:
No password needed
[28]
Please find link to “Congo Calling” short
demo here:
https://vimeo.com/263738160
[29]
Please find link to “Congo Calling “ Video
Portfolio here: https://vimeopro.com/usertedfolke/congo-calling
[31]
For more, please see http://socialcapital.wordpress.com/2011/01/26/twitter-facebook-and-youtubes-role-in-tunisia-uprising
[33]
Gary Small and Gigi Vorgan ( Your Brain
is Evolving Right Now) in The Digital
Divide, (ibid) p. 79
[34] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_overload
[35]
Small and Vorgan (ibid.) p.
[36]
In the United States, motion picture exhibitors have noticed an alarming
decline in cinema attendance among Millennials. They prefer to look at films
through streaming sites such as Netflix, and the future of cinema as we know it
is in doubt.
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-ca-mn-moviegoing-future-multiplex-golden-age-20170602-htmlstory.html
[37]
For “ The Man With a Movie Camera:”, please
click on this link: https://youtu.be/cGYZ5847FiI
[38] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/06/hollywood-has-a-huge-millennial-problem/486209/
[39] A classic example is the book by Michael
Rosenblum ( i-Phone Millionaire- How to
Shoot and Sell Cutting Edge Video ) Basic Books, 2013
[40]
James Monaco( How to Read a Film-Movies,
Media and Beyond) Oxford University Press, Fourth Edition, 2009. Pp.578-637
[41]
Neil Postman ( Technopoly- The Surrender
of Culture to Technology) Vintage Books, 1993, p.18
[42]
Nicholas Carr ( is google making us
stupid?) in The Digital Divide,
Edited by Mark Bauerlein. Jeremy P.Tarcher/Penguin, 2011. P.69
[44]
It is important to bear in mind prior to 2000, there were also analog video documentaries, mostly shot
on Betacam videotape, along with other short-lived formats.
[45]
J.Hoberman ( Film After Film – Or, What
Became of 21st Century Cinema?) Verso, 2012, p.3
[46]
Henry Jenkins( Convergence Culture – Where Old and New Media
Collide), New York and London, New York University Press,2006
[47]
Lev Manovich, (The Language of New Media)
The MIT Press, Cambridge, Masschusett and London, England 2002
[48]
Manovich, ibid
[49]
www.YouTube.com/MONUCVIDEO
[50] https://www.democracynow.org
[51] https://www.thisiscongo.com
No comments:
Post a Comment